‘So, there you are, with your hand up her skirt, and she’s begging you to go further,’ I would say, ‘and the teacher walks in. What a nightmare. No wonder she was looking so hot and agitated when she came back to the class.’
‘I know,’ Fabián might say. ‘I was pretty agitated myself, I can tell you.’
‘Terrible,’ I would say. ‘Well, maybe next time.’
‘Sure. One day.’
There would be a pause, and then I would say:
‘Anything could have happened in that cupboard, couldn’t it?’
‘You’re right,’ Fabián would say. ‘Anything could have happened. Anything from full penetrative sex through to a bit of harmless flirting followed by a kick in the balls.’
‘So, on that scale of possibility, what would a really unimaginative person say had happened to him in that cupboard?’
‘The unimaginative person would probably say that he followed Verena into the cupboard hoping to cop a feel, but that she bashed him round the head with a foolscap folder before making him carry about three tons of paper back to the classroom for her. Something like that.’
‘How unimaginative.’
‘Quite. How disappointing,’ Fabián would say.
As we had already had one version of what had happened at the Semana Santa parade, I was expecting the true story to come out in a similar fashion. What I didn’t expect was that ‘the truth’ would far outgun the story.
‘Are you going to tell me what really happened with the arm?’ I said.
‘It’s not what really happened with the arm that’s the best bit,’ he said.
And he told me how he had seen a vision of his mother looking down on him from within the glass case of the Virgin during the Easter parade.
I didn’t have a clue how I was supposed to react. In all of our two years of banter, not once had the idea of a religious experience come up. And, as I said, we had never, even remotely, touched on the subject of his mother.
I stayed silent, trying to disguise my growing unease, while he went on talking, apparently rationally, about the reasons why he thought his mother had chosen to appear to him from within the glass case.
‘I’m not sure, but I think it means that she must be trapped somewhere,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’ He looked at me with a calm smile.
‘What do I think?’
‘Yeah.’
Putting my beer down on the table, I then said something very stupid:
‘Fabián. What would the unimaginative person say had happened here?’
His eyes jabbed in my direction.
‘I’m not fucking around, you know,’ he said. ‘I really did see my mother in that crowd.’
One of the pitfalls of being Fabián’s friend was the occasional moment of panic and uncertainty as, halfway through a game, he changed the rules without telling you. I was used to it. I’d done it to others myself alongside him. But at this moment, I felt more at sea in his company than ever before.
‘I thought—’
‘You thought what? This isn’t something I would go round telling at school. I’m speaking the truth.’
‘I know, but I thought … Your mother’s dead, isn’t she?’
Fabián took a slurp of his beer and stared over at the bookshelves on the other side of Suarez’s desk. The jukebox switched records clumsily, from ‘Great Balls of Fire’ to ‘Roll Over Beethoven’.
He seemed about to say something, and then turned his head back to the beer. He finished it in a few gutsy gulps and, with his good arm, chucked the bottle at the wall. He wasn’t left-handed, but it was a powerful throw. The bottle shattered right on the beat, in time to Chuck Berry, sending shards skittering across the chequerboard floor and leaving a round, foaming blotch beside the jukebox.
‘Just believe me, will you?’ he said.
‘Okay. I believe you,’ I said.
‘If I’m going to tell you about my parents, I’m going to need to get a lot more drunk than this.’
‘Fine by me,’ I said.
A Fabián I didn’t know was dangerously near the surface. While the voyeur in me wanted to expose that person once and for all, I was conscious nonetheless of the need to tread carefully.
‘What about getting out Suarez’s shrunken head?’ said Fabián, getting up and swaggering over towards the safe. ‘I wouldn’t mind having another look at that. Do you believe all that stuff about the curse, and the lover’s finger?’
Okay, I thought. Okay, we’ll leave it for the moment. I can play this game.
‘I don’t know. I suppose so. I know he builds things up sometimes to make his stories better. But do you think he’d lie to us?’
‘Of course he would. He probably just bought that tsantza himself from a junk shop. Stupid old bastard. He thinks we’re still kids. He thinks he can tell us anything he likes. I looked it up, you know – there’s a massive black-market trade in fake shrunken heads, just made out of pigskin and stuff, sold to tourists. The Shuar even make fake ones for themselves to perform their rituals, because they aren’t allowed to cut people’s heads off any more. There’s hardly any cocking chance it’s the real thing. The book I looked at even said how the real ones are made – they shrink the skin over a fire, then fill it up with pebbles so they can remould the face with their fingers. It’s got dick-all to do with shrinking it in the sun around a stone.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose you just have to ask yourself whether it felt real at the time; I mean—’
‘I asked him whether if I went travelling with my mother’s finger I would feel better about her not being here,’ said Fabián, perusing the bookshelves. ‘Unfair of me, probably, given that he’s her brother. He said it was up to me. He just came out with that same stupid line he always says: “Grief asks different questions of us all.” He’s an idiot.’
‘Hadn’t we better clean up that glass?’ I said.
‘No, leave it. Come over here. Look at the size of this encyclopaedia. Look at all the stuff there is out there. We have to go and see some of it. Otherwise we might as well be beaten to death up a mountain like poor fucking Juanita. I want to get away from Suarez and his fake shrunken head. I want to find my own shrunken heads.’
‘What about finding something else to drink?’ I suggested.
‘A noble suggestion!’ said Fabián, turning away from the encyclopaedia and pointing his finger at me. ‘First sensible thing you’ve said. You stay here and watch the driveway for Suarez. I think I know where he keeps a bottle of tequila. Otherwise, I’m going to break into Byron’s house and steal from him. Let him try and shoot me if he dares.’
Forgetting that Byron was driving Suarez, so wouldn’t be there to shoot Fabián even if he had wanted him to, Fabián left the library. I moved over to where he had been standing, near the bookshelves, from where I’d be able to see the lights of Byron’s car if he and Suarez came back.
Let’s get a few things clear here:
The set of encyclopaedias was not made of ancient cracked leather, or trimmed in gold leaf.
The binding of the volume did not billow out centuries-old dust as I opened it.
I did not find myself gazing in fascination at descriptions of a forgotten continent.
The twenty-two-volume family edition of the Encylopaedia Ecuatoriana was backed in leather-effect brown plastic, illustrated with faded 1970s colour photographs and printed on cheap, almost translucent, paper. It sat in Suarez’s library, between his imposing medical textbooks and a collection of old-style, red-spined Everyman Classics. You could have gone into any other middle-class home and found the same publication. In a belated effort to follow my mother’s suggestion, I pulled down the S–T volume and opened it at ‘Stonehenge’.
Just reading the name again was like throwing back the dustsheet on a stockpile of drab English memories: drizzle and anoraks, motorway cafés, a dismal visitors’ centre. But as I read the entry, I began to see the place in a different light. Why hadn’t I been
told this stuff before? Here were druids and solstices, and great, hefty unknowns. I’d opened the encyclopaedia expecting it to be a boring, factual reference book – the sort of thing you were supposed to consult – but in frank, unashamed prose, this one explained the cosmic felicities in the location of the site, detailed the mystery of how the stone had been transported there from Wales, and referred me to an entry in another of its volumes relating how Joseph of Arimathea had visited Glastonbury and planted a spear there that became a rose-bush.
Something began to make thrilling sense to me. When I had first met Byron two years previously, he had asked me where I was from, and I had said England.
‘Ah, Londres,’ he said. ‘City of the kings.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘London is the city where you still have kings and queens,’ he said, wistfully.
At the time, the remark had merely struck me as naive, but now, faced with this encyclopaedia and all its entries, his words seemed defining, iconic – a lesson in how removal could enable re-imagination, how looking at things in the right way could breathe warmth into the palest of truths. If such a simple re-expression of the facts could do that for grey old England, then what could it do for Ecuador, where princesses frozen in mountains made the headlines on a day-to-day basis?
I took down an earlier volume, and turned to the entry for Inca:
Lots of dates; lots of facts; a terrible photograph of Machu Picchu; a woodblock print of the great feuding brothers, Huáscar and Atahualpa. Some juicy details about brain banquets and the massacres of Spanish Catholics, which were promising.
Further down, another entry, ‘Isla de Plata’:
Known as the ‘poor man’s Galápagos’; profusion of endemic species; humpback whales migrating from Antarctica to Colombia; named Island of Silver (or Money) on account of being site of (as yet undiscovered) treasure of Francis Drake; seventy-two tons of silver thrown overboard; nesting ground for albatross and blue-footed boobies.
As yet undiscovered.
‘Okay then,’ said Fabián, charging in with a tray. ‘Here it is: tequila, limes, salt. I sense a quest coming on.’
‘Have a look at this,’ I said, bringing the encyclopaedia over to the table.
‘Are you mad? Look at this, man! Whatever it is, it can wait. Sit down.’
‘But this—’
‘I thought you wanted to hear about my parents. Take the chance now before I change my mind.’
Fabián unplugged the jukebox, turned off the overhead lighting and switched on the set of antique disco lights that Suarez had installed in the library. This story was to be told not by firelight, but by roaming spotlights of phased red and blue.
Before putting the book back on the shelf, I committed a place name from the map to memory: a small town, on the coast, not far from the Isla de Plata, with a reputation for surfing. There were other, bigger-looking places, some of which I’d heard much more about, but this name leapt out at me and stayed in a negative image on my retina after I had closed the covers – even after the room had been thrown into a silent dogfight of scrolling primary colours.
The name was Pedrascada.
Fabián positioned himself in front of the tequila tray and poured two pairs of shots. Solemnly, we each threw back one, then another. Our winces turned into nervous smirks after the second, but Fabián said, ‘No laughing. These ones we can sip.’
He poured out two more, and we sat staring at each other across the table as if an accusation of cardsharping hung in the air. The only sound in the room was the gentle creak of rusting disco hinges.
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ said Fabián.
FIVE
Something you don’t know about me is that my dad was a mestizo (said Fabián). He would never have admitted it, but he was. His grandmother was an Indian, from Peguche. He used to claim that even she was technically a mestiza, and that his Indian blood was so diluted as a result that it didn’t exist.
‘Mestizaje is relative,’ he would say. ‘In Europe, maybe I would be considered a mestizo. I have enough Indian blood in me to be seen as different over there. In Ecuador, I am not. Here, I am white. I am basically a Castilian.’ What he really meant was that he was ashamed of his own grandmother. Suarez would never approve, with all his crap about ancestry and the way he loves all that indigenous stuff, even though he is about as pure a conquistador as you can get.
But my father – that’s Señor Félix Morales to you – well, he would never admit it. He tried as hard as he could to be what he thought was a European: he would listen to classical Spanish music, and try to dance the pasadoble like some flamenco expert. He even wore this crazy red and white spotted neckerchief the whole time, imagining it to be somehow sophisticated. My mother, who had no Indian blood that we know of, loved dancing and listening to all that terrible pan-pipe music. She even spoke quite good Quechua.
Papi had grown up hearing folk-tales about women who had given birth to calves, and men who turned into condors – some great stuff. But he would never tell them. My mother would ask him sometimes to tell us his grandmother’s stories, and he would say, ‘If you want to hear a load of peasant rubbish you can look it all up in a textbook, or go and ask the first campesina you find grinding barley in a hut in the mountains.’
He read nothing but Spanish literature, and even put on a hint of a lisp sometimes, like in a Madrileño accent. He’d only ever been to Spain twice in his life, and even then only on business trips with the construction company.
All this revolution stuff is bullshit, you know. Mestizos might make up a third of the population but it’s not the top third – and that’s before you even get to the full-blood Indians. I mean, look at the people who live in the New Town. Ask the kids at school, or any of your parents’ buddies at that stupid sports club: they still think that one Indian is like every other Indian. They might just as well be animals.
So, Papi was embarrassed by who he was – and yes, he was impressed by my mother’s money. Look at all this – you don’t think all this came from doctoring, do you? Suarez and Mami come from a wealthy family. My father liked that.
I’m only telling you this so that you can see what kind of man he was. He was scared of himself, scared of being found out, scared of not being real, or something; I don’t know.
Here, have another tequila.
Arriba, abajo, a centro, adentro. Mother of God, this is strong stuff. Sit up straight. Are you listening to me?
It was just over seven years ago. I was eight years old.
We used to go on these driving trips at weekends. My parents liked to disappear into the mountains, eat at village cafés, maybe go for a walk, that kind of thing. It was fun, even though I bitched about it at the time.
One day, we were somewhere really high up in the cordillera. We were meant to go for a walk, but it was raining hard, so we drove up to have a look at this hacienda instead. The Hacienda La Reina, it was called.
It was one of those farms that are so huge that whole villages grow up around them: there was a school, a church and even a little post office shop for the workers and their children. It was a beautiful place. The houses and fields were set against these massive green mountains. The air was wonderful.
When we got up to the hacienda we found a fiesta in progress. I think it’s called Zaparo – some Indian harvest festival. An excuse for people to let their hair down and get messed up.
The farm workers had been drinking homemade chicha and aguardiente for hours, and they were falling around all over the place. A band was marching round the fields, playing music. People were wearing bright red head-dresses made of feathers. Lanterns were being lit.
My parents weren’t the sort of people who just got back in the car in a situation like that, and soon they were eating the food, drinking the booze and chatting to the locals. There was a suckling pig on a spit, and kids sitting around playing. It was pretty cool.
I don’t know how my father got so drunk so quic
kly – I guess he wasn’t used to the home-made chicha they drink up in the mountains. It’s gross, man. You know they make it with saliva? The women spit in a bowl with a load of maize and then ferment it. Sick shit, but the indígenas love it.
There was a paddock in the middle of the area where the festival was taking place, with a separate, smaller pen full of bulls to the side. I can’t remember how it started, but soon most of the party was crowded round this paddock, cheering and singing. There was a group of Indian farm-workers in the field, and they had started doing some amateur bullfighting for the crowd.
The bulls were little – they wouldn’t have been any problem for a proper torero. But these weren’t toreros: they were very drunk campesinos wearing rubber boots that slid around in the mud after the rain.
We stood around, getting into the spirit of the occasion, cheering and laughing when someone made a good pass. Messing around. Nobody was really going to hurt these bulls – the idea was just to get out of their way.
You know how it works. Normally, you hang your muleta on the estoque, the sword, to create that cape that the bull chases. All that olé crap. These guys were just pretending – running around waving their ponchos in the air for a laugh, then coming out of the paddock to high-five their buddies and try to impress girls into going back to their cottage for a fuck.
Papi secretly loved those Indian festivals. He was taking more and more from the chicha bowl, and swaying around to the music. It was when he was in moods like this – in other words, when it suited him – that he used to let his mask drop and go on about how great it was to be an Ecuadorian, that you had the best of both worlds. The sophistication of Europe, the spirituality of an Indian, blah blah blah. But then he started to get angry about the way the men in the paddock were treating the bulls.
The Amnesia Clinic Page 6